For me, baking has never been just about making something sweet. It has always been tied to family, curiosity, persistence, and the memories that stay with us long after the last slice is gone.

My love for baking began in high school.

During family gatherings, my aunt—my father’s sister—would make her famous chiffon cake and chocolate moist cake. I was fascinated by how a handful of simple ingredients could become something everyone looked forward to. I would watch her work in the kitchen and constantly ask her to teach me, never realizing that those afternoons would become the beginning of my own story with pastry.

At the time, my father was working abroad as an Executive Chef in Saudi Arabia. He quietly encouraged my growing interest from thousands of miles away.



Whenever he sent balikbayan boxes home, tucked among everything else would be baking pans, spatulas, whisks, and other kitchen tools he had picked out for me. Every new piece of equipment felt like an invitation to keep experimenting.

And experiment I did.

Throughout high school and college, I taught myself how to bake at home. There were no professional kitchens, expensive mixers, or fancy ovens. My first little “pastry kitchen” revolved around a small electric oven that could barely fit an 8-inch cake pan.

I spent hours watching baking videos on YouTube, trying to understand techniques I had never seen in person.

I read hundreds of recipes online, compared ingredients and methods, studied comments, and tried to figure out why one baker did something differently from another. Then I would try it myself—with whatever ingredients and equipment I could afford. A good portion of my allowance went toward flour, butter, eggs, chocolate, cream cheese, and whatever ingredient my latest experiment called for.

And I failed. A lot. Some cakes sank in the middle. Others were too dense or refused to rise. A few smelled unmistakably like uncooked eggs. Thankfully, I had cousins who were always willing to eat them anyway.

Looking back, those failed cakes were some of the most important things I ever baked.

Every mistake taught me something about temperature, texture, ingredients, timing, patience, and eventually, confidence. Little by little, the cakes improved. The egg smell disappeared. The failures became less frequent.

What began as curiosity slowly became something I genuinely loved.

When it was time for college, I pursued a Bachelor of Science in Hotel and Restaurant Management in Butuan City, my father’s hometown, and attended his alma mater. At the time, no schools in the city offered a specialization in Culinary Arts, much less Baking and Pastry Arts. So I chose the course that came closest to the path I wanted and made the most of what was available to me.

Hospitality school gave me a broader understanding of food, service, and the industry as a whole. But pastry was always the part that felt most personal.

A couple of years after graduating, that love for baking would take me much farther from home.

I became a pastry cook for Royal Caribbean Cruises.

For three years, I worked professionally in pastry while traveling around the world.

Suddenly, baking was no longer something I was figuring out alone in front of a tiny electric oven. I was working in professional kitchens, producing pastries on a scale I could never have imagined when I first started. I worked alongside chefs from different countries and backgrounds and prepared food for guests from all over the world.

Life at sea taught me far more than recipes.

It taught me discipline, consistency, speed, teamwork, adaptability, and the care required to produce something to the same standard every single day.

For a while, pastry was not simply something I loved. It was my career.

Had the pandemic never happened, there is a good chance I would still be working as a chef today—somewhere at sea, moving from one country to another and continuing to build a life around pastry.

But life had other plans.

When the pandemic brought that chapter of my career to an unexpected end, I stayed home and eventually found myself pursuing a completely different professional path.

Baking was no longer my everyday job. But it never really left me. And that is where The Pastry Diaries comes in.

I created The Pastry Diaries not simply as a place to sell baked goods, but as a way to reconnect with why I started baking in the first place. It brings me back to my aunt’s cakes at family gatherings, my father sending baking tools home from Saudi Arabia, and the excitement of opening a balikbayan box and finding something new for the kitchen.

It brings me back to late nights spent watching baking videos, comparing recipes, and spending my allowance on ingredients just to see if an idea would work. It brings me back to that tiny electric oven, the cakes that sank, the ones that smelled like eggs, and the cousins who happily ate them anyway. And it brings me back to the pastry kitchens at sea, where something I once taught myself at home became my profession.

Every recipe at The Pastry Diaries carries a little piece of that journey.

Some are inspired by familiar classics and flavors I grew up with. Others are combinations I have discovered and loved along the way. Some are nostalgic. Some are playful. And some simply begin with the same question that started everything for me:

What if I tried this?

Whether it is a brownie, a muffin, a cupcake, a cookie, a loaf, or something completely new, I want what I make to feel thoughtful and comforting. I want it to feel like there is a story behind it. Because to me, pastries have never been just pastries. They are family gatherings and balikbayan boxes. They are late-night recipe searches, ingredients bought with saved allowance, and cakes baked in an oven that was barely big enough. They are mistakes that teach you something, people who encourage you without making a big deal about it, opportunities you never expected, and paths that sometimes lead you away from what you love before bringing you back to it.



Baking has followed me through different versions of my life—from a curious teenager in a small kitchen, to a hospitality student, to a pastry cook traveling the world, and eventually to someone finding his way back to the thing that started it all.

That is what The Pastry Diaries means to me.

It is more than a hobby and a side hustle. It is more than just an online baking business. It is a collection of memories, experiments, lessons, flavors, and pieces of a life shaped in one way or another by pastry.

It is my love letter to baking.

And I hope that whenever you open one of my boxes, something inside creates a memory of its own.

Every bite tells a story.